This article originally based on work done by Frontalot at Linkstationwiki.org

A benchmark is test that measures the performance of a system or subsystem on a well-defined task or set of tasks.
Benchmarks are often used to measure general things like graphics, I/O, computing (integer and floating point), etc., performance, but most measure more specific tasks like rendering polygons, reading and writing files, or performing operations on matrixes.